Category: Photography Projects

I’ve decided to start doing some personal photography projects, so you may see posts like this every now and then here. I’ll still do the regular travel posts as well 🙂

So far, my favorite town along the California coast has been Santa Barbara. When I came back to Southern California to get out of the heat wave in Utah, I went back to Santa Barbara. Well, actually, I thought I’d give Los Angeles another try, and I lasted about 16 hours there before heading out.

Santa Barbara has a couple nice beaches. One of them is called Hendry’s Beach. I’d just gotten a new camera and some new (but actually really old) lenses. I wanted to test them out – particularly to test focusing manually with the new camera and lesnes. I found good subject matter for this on the beach and decided to make a little personal photo project out of it.

On part of Hendry’s Beach, dogs are allowed off-leash. It’s essentially a dog park and beach combined. The dogs love it here. They run around, splash and play in the water, socialize, and play lots and lots of fetch.

I shot a whole bunch of photos of the dogs out there, over about 7 different days. My daily routine looked something like this:

7am – wake up. Drive over to the beach (about 1 mile from the area I’d sleep in)

8am – have breakfast

9am – make coffee (Lattes made with real Espresso!)

10am – meander out to the beach. Take pictures of some of the dogs there. Alternate the photo shooting with sitting around on the beach, a times practicing Spanish words that I’m learning and have written in a notebook that I bring along.

11am – back to hang out in the van

Rest of the day – repeat cycles of walking around on the beach, taking dog pictures, sitting down on the beach and practicing Spanish, going back to the van to eat, sort the pictures, etc.

The pictures:

Yes, that is a WOLF. I initially thought it was a coyote, but it’s a puppy wolf.

It’s a pet, or… is sort of. A guy brought it to the beach most days and one day I talked to him about the wolf. It’s just a puppy and has another 100lbs to grow. The guy said that he’s taking it to a sanctuary in Hawaii and is waiting for the quarantine period to end before flying it out. I asked how he came to have the dog, and he said he breeds them. I don’t understand why he’d breed a dog and then take it to a sanctuary, but I didn’t want to keep asking a lot more questions.

The wolf was nice to all the other dogs, and was very submissive. When some people tried to pet it, it was shy and backed away. It had no interest in fetching. It just ran around the beach, went in the water, and socialized with dogs.